Sasha Baillie, Luxinnovation CEO, pictured in Belval  Mike Zenari

Sasha Baillie, Luxinnovation CEO, pictured in Belval  Mike Zenari

Sasha Baillie says Luxinnovation has been in full “listening mode”, adding it’s key to “completely understand the needs of companies and get their perspectives”.

The national promotion agency provides on-the-ground expertise while alerting companies to challenges, keeping them “prepared, aware and stimulated to find their own solutions”.  

Among recent trends Baillie says they have noticed “is that client behaviours have changed. Consumers are behaving differently, so companies have to adapt to that, and a lot of that is around digital.” 

Coupled with that, “there’s definitely more awareness for sustainable solutions. Clients want more sustainable solutions [and] products that respect these values much more.” 

Baillie is optimistic: despite the health crisis and related challenges, there are a host of opportunities, with the national innovation agency helping to provide tailor-made solutions for companies.

“I’m being ambitious, but maybe, as a country, we can also be an example, a testbed for certain solutions. It's very difficult at this stage to see precisely what that is, but we do get a sense that there's something out there that we can grasp,” she says.

A main focus into 2021 will be data, and good governance thereof. “If we can connect the dots between data, make it interoperable, we can be much more precise in the solutions we can bring.” Such data has vast potential--from regional food chains and precision farming, to utilising space data for intelligent applications. But privacy has to be guaranteed in full, “otherwise it’s not going to be trusted, [nor] usable”.

Luxinnovation has an ambitious mission to map out key Luxembourg sectors--a mechanism which should allow players, locally and beyond, to understand the national landscape and have a dynamic view on the sector. 

Some mapping is complete--health tech, cybersecurity, wood value chain, to name a few--while startups and industry 4.0 are on the horizon. In the case of startups, for example, Baillie hopes the mapping will glean information on the full ecosystem, including which startups have evolved, or even disappeared. In addition, it could give a sense of the private or public investment behind each startup, as well as value generated, also in terms of potential new businesses developing and growing in the grand duchy. 

“You need the whole picture of the whole value chain, and the companies working [in] that. If you can connect them, you can do so much more with this wonderful resource at our disposal.”

This article originally appeared in the 2021 Forecast edition of Delano released on 16 December.